Pages

Thursday, 27 March 2014

We have been learning about all the ways we can make 10. Today we wrote all the ways we could think of on the floor using chalk. We then represented them using blue and red blocks. The video below contains some of the observations we made.

Don't forget parents- library day is every Thursday. Please make sure your child brings their books back each Thursday.

We are lucky to have a series of augmented reality books in our library that can be used in conjunction with our ipads. This is a short clip of Josh reading a book about dinosaurs using his Ipad! The Ipad makes the book really come to life. You can see he really loves these books.

Wednesday, 26 March 2014

Today we did our writing using Educreations and we worked in pairs. First we took a photo of our friend- then we recorded a verbal brainstorm before we started our writing.

The video above shows some of the writing process. The Educreations below are some of what we made. Room 8 kids are getting pretty good at using Educreations and adding photos by themselves! Sometimes though we forgot to record our voices on a slide, or we recorded the whole time we were writing! We will keep practising!

Today the Green Reading Group had their first go at using the Puppet Pals app for reading.

The free version of this app lets the kids take photos and use them as characters, and use their own background. The children said they liked it because it was a fun way to practise their reading. The part that they didn't like was that they couldn't delete parts if they made a mistake.

The app is available by clicking the link below- it would be a great way for your child to practise their reading and fluency at home too!

Tuesday, 25 March 2014

Yesterday we had our school swimming sports at Stratford pools. We had all 3 pools operating. Room 8 students were involved in a skills demonstration then lots of fun races like walking backwards, flutterboard kick and dolphin dives. Even Miss Nicholas swam in the teacher/ parent/ student relay. We had such a fun day!

Tuesday, 18 March 2014

Last Thursday morning, you may have heard some strange sounds coming from the Auroa School Hall. Some of the teachers decided to get together and play some music! Mr Bloor was on drums, Mr Spice on bass guitar, Mr Tai on guitar and vocals and Miss Nicholas on trumpet! We played Mr Spice's favourite song, and decided we would play it at assembly the next day. I think the kids really enjoyed it! Mr Bloor put together this awesome video.
Have you got any ideas of more songs we could play?

Saturday, 15 March 2014

In Room 8 this week, we have started to learn about music. We have been thinking about tempo (fast and slow) and we have been learning how to read musical rhythms. We discovered that by listening to music we can hear a story. We listened to Grieg's Hall of the Mountain King, and closed our eyes to imagine what was happening in the music. Miss Nicholas didn't tell the class what the piece was called, so that they could form their own ideas. After, we watched an orchestra performance of the same piece on youtube, and discussed and researched the instruments we could see. Room 8 has been asking to listen to the piece every day since! We hope you enjoy some of our stories about what we heard!

Tuesday, 11 March 2014

The Pentagons maths group is learning to add by counting on from the biggest number. Here is a video Bailey and Siobhan made to explain how to use this strategy. We used the App "Farmyard Make a Scene" to create a problem, then the children took a snapshot of this and imported it into Educreations to solve it.

Friday, 7 March 2014

This week we have been learning all about the letter B! We have been writing it in phonics, and learning about bees too. On Wednesday we were lucky enough to have Quinn's mum Rebecca, and Lauren's Mum Claire in to help us. We made our own toast using brown bread, and wrote the letter 'b' on it using honey. We all thought it was delicious. (Mums and Dads, you should be expecting breakfast in bed now!) We learned that bees make honey by collecting nectar and taking to their hives. We also made our own bees using coloured paper. We are getting really good at using scissors!

Thursday, 6 March 2014

Yesterday when we were out practising for athletics, we noticed our mountain looking really special. Their was a big cloud over it, and a fresh dumping of snow! We went and got our writing books and Ipads, and took photos of what we could see. Some of us thought the cloud looked like a mushroom. These are photos of us doing our writing, and some pictures of what we wrote.

Mrs Derbyshire @ Auroa School

I am a teacher at Auroa School in South Taranaki, New Zealand. I am currently on a sabbatical as part of the Science Teaching Leadership Programme. This programme is administered through the Royal Society of NZ, and funded by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. For the first 6 months of 2016 I will be based at Rotokare Scenic Reserve, learning about Science in the real world, whilst doing lots of training about teaching science. I'm looking forward to returning to school to work with the other teachers to make our science programme even better than it already is.

About Room 8

We are a year 0-2 class at Auroa School in South Taranaki, on the West Coast of New Zealand. Our school is surrounded by farmland, but we are not far from the beach either. We love technology at our school, and we use iPads and Macs and Apple Tv to enhance our learning. We have 2 teachers in our class. This is Miss Nicholas' blog. Please leave a comment, we love to see who has visited.